DIY Arduino Watch

We first thought [Alexis Ospitia]’s watch was a sports watch made with an Arduino, but it’s actually a sporty watch made with an Arduino. This explains the watch’s strange ability to tell you the current temperature and humidity.

The core of the watch is an Arduino Mini. To make it good for time telling, a real-time clock module was added. A DHT11 monitors the temperature and humidity. A charge circuit and lithium battery provide power. Finally, the watch displays the date, time, and other data with an LCD from a Nokia 5110. We can tell you the last part that’s going to break on this.

Even if you think the watch is a bit chunky, the tutorial is very slick. [Alexis] has taken the trouble to individually draw and describe each portion of the watch’s construction. He explains each pin, what they do, and provides a Fritzing drawing of the wires to the Arduino. The code is provided; to program the watch a USB-to-serial module must be used.

For the housing he made a box from a thin gauge aluminum sheet and attached leather straps to the assembly. The final construction is cool looking in a techno-punk way, and is fairly compact. One might even say sporty.

Really like your design, might make one myself. To prolong the life of the strap though I would suggest adding a metal bar which clamps down on to the strap using the two screws already in place, this would help spread some of the stress away from the screw holes and along the width the strap. If the bar had a few little teeth that could bite into the leather this would be even better but I’d need to think how you could make such a part easily at home.

I’d love to take on a build like this. I think the driver scheme for eink is quite a bit more complicated. I’ve seen the 1.3″ Sharp display Adafruit sells. It sounds like that’s actually an LCD display with super high contrast (so you avoid the difficult to drive issue).

Has anyone been able to source and successfully drive a tiny eink display themselves? I’m thinking 1.8″ or smaller.

I still do not understand why so many people are doing their watch project using an Arduino. Since there is MSP430 (especially fram series) which can run for ages with one CR2032 battery. The same applies for the Sharp memory LCD. I am still convinced that EZ430-Chronos is perfect starting point for the watch project. IMHO it is perfect dev-kit for that. And I think that the price is acceptable.

On the strap part: I would make it a bit wider so the watch/display is a HOLE in the strap.

The way it is now, the strap goes from one side of the watch to the other around the wrist. My way there would be better strength with the strap/watch connection as there would be less stress on the connection points and less chance of failure there.

Small bars (similar to what were suggested by someone else) would hold the display/watch in place and not need to be as strong as they would need to be with the shown method.

Shame I can’t include a drawing of the idea. But I hope how I described it helps.